This paper presents ongoing research in two universities in the Global South, in South Africa and Brazil. The research falls in the field of Linguistic Ethnography. I focus here on the linguistic landscapes of the universities, online and offline. My analysis of the data is guided by a Bakhtinian approach.
In this paper, I present research in progress in a project entitled: Communicative resources and knowledge repertoires of international students: academic literacy practices at a South African university and a Brazilian university. This research is being carried out in two universities in the Global South. The South African university context is acknowledged as being multilingual. Since 2002, language policy in South African universities advocates the promotion of multilingualism. In the Brazilian university context, despite the extensive multilingualism in the wider population, a monolingual ideology prevails – one that privileges Portuguese. In both research sites, I have adopted a linguistic ethnographic approach. I have conducted detailed observations of the linguistic landscapes, including online and offline data. My aim is to build an account of the multimodal linguistic landscapes encountered by international students at the two universities. The data included photographs, notices about public events, adverts, student texts and the websites of both institutions. The offline landscape in the South African university was both multimodal and multilingual. The offline landscape in the Brazilian university was multimodal but the verbal dimension was mostly Portuguese. In both cases, the official online forms of communication were more monolingual, with predominant use of former colonial languages. The South African university website used English only. The Brazilian university website was mainly in Portuguese. In response to recent policy on internationalization in Brazilian higher education, some postgraduate programs have sites with information in English. In my presentation, I will point to the language ideologies indexed by these different linguistic landscapes and, taking a Bakhtinian approach, I will consider the centripetal and centrifugal social forces act at work in these two academic contexts in the wake of internationalization.
